Sahara

The glare of the desert sun outside the windows was dazzling to the eyes even from within the hotel, and the three of us sitting in the reception area were glad of the relief offered by the hard-working air conditioning. Dave, an American oil company executive in his early forties, was waiting for a Land Rover to pick him up and take him on a two-day inspection tour of his company's locations, further south into the deep desert. His wife Estelle, mid-thirties (like me), friendly, very American and quite delightful, had come along on the trip hoping to see something of the great sand sea that she believed, having been brought up on Hollywood epics, covered the whole of North Africa. And me? I was Jim, the English pilot of the small, fast Beechcraft Twin Bonanza that Dave's Tripoli office had chartered to fly the two of them the 400 miles south to the small desert town of Sebha.

Estelle was disappointed that on the flight down the previous day she had seen a lot of featureless gravel plain and very little else of interest at all. Over dinner I told them that Libya has several large sand seas. Two of them, the Murzuq and the Ubari, were close to Sebha, and Dave agreed that while he was away I could take Estelle to see one or the other of them, and he would square it with his head office when they went back home to the States.

His Land Rover was late arriving so it was mid-morning before he got away. I had planned to take Estelle on a sight-seeing trip around the town first thing but the already blistering temperature outside was going to rise even higher over the midday period, and a walking tour was likely to become very uncomfortable. Since she was leaving all the arrangements to me I suggested spending the morning by the hotel pool, having a late lunch and then going out towards the evening, when it would be getting cooler.

At the poolside I slid a couple of recliners into the shade and ten minutes later Estelle joined me, wearing a simple one-piece swimsuit cut very low indeed at the back, with a halter top tied in a bow under her hair. Her chunky little body had curves in all the right places, with a combination of nicely pushed-up boobs, good firm legs, and a deliciously trim waist that gave me an instant hard-on as I imagined getting my hands round it. As she settled on the recliner she caught me looking her over and grinned.

'Well, Jim, do you like what you see?'

'Yes, very much indeed.'

'Why, thank you sir, that's made my day.'

She smiled broadly as she said it, making it plain that she regarded my appreciation as a compliment. Which it was -- my taste has always been for women who are shaped like women, not like some size zero stick insect! We had a swim and in the heat were dry almost as soon as we got out of the pool. Estelle produced a bottle of sun cream and applied some to her arms and legs and then asked me if I would do her back. She passed the bottle over to me, lay face down on the sun bed and undid the halter, and believe me when I say that I enjoyed every single second of running my hands repeatedly over her smooth firm shoulders and back, right down to the two dimples just visible above the edge of her swimsuit.

We chatted for quite a while that morning, the first time we had been on our own since we had met in Tripoli the previous afternoon. She was very interested in the Sahara and the way we flew light aircraft in desert conditions, and I was fascinated by her accounts of small town life in the States, apparently totally insulated from anything happening in the real world. After another swim she volunteered to apply sun cream to my back -- which I found rather enjoyable - and then she gave me the bottle and lay face down again on her recliner, giving me a second chance to enjoy feeling up her soft, warm body. Indeed, I was so slow and took so long this time that after a while she stretched her arms right out above her head and wriggled a bit under my hands.

'You're enjoying this, aren't you Jim?'

Well, hell, yes I was! I was speechless for a few seconds and then decided to make the best of it.

'We poor hardworking desert pilots' -- I was interrupted by a noise from her that sounded suspiciously like a snort -- 'we poor desert pilots don't get much in the way of perks, so if anything good comes along we like to make the most of it.'

'It's OK Jim, I'm enjoying it too.'

She grinned at me and just about then I realised that I was in what we English would term a 'bit of a pickle'. Under normal circumstances I would have taken such words and actions coming from a very attractive woman as a signal that she was ready to move our relationship up to a new level and was expecting me to do something about it. But the circumstances were not normal. To be blunt I was, when all was said and done, merely what Americans would call the hired help. I was contracted to fly the two of them around for another couple of days, and any mis-interpretation of her very pleasant and outgoing personality could easily lead to a most uncomfortable time together. I decided that my best course of action was to follow her lead and play along, so I grinned back and settled down next to her on my own recliner.

Later, after a lazy lunch together, I excused myself and left Estelle in the air conditioned comfort of her room while I walked down to the airstrip. I moved the plane into the shade and had a word about my evening plans with the duty air traffic controller, and then went back to the hotel. Late in the afternoon the two of us, both wearing shorts and short-sleeved sports shirts, looked around the souk and the few shops -- just opening again after the long afternoon siesta -- and laughed together about some of the items on display, and by the time we had arrived at the airstrip in the early evening it seemed quite natural for us to be walking hand in hand.

Twenty minutes later we were airborne, level at 1,000 feet, trimmed into the cruise and heading southwest. I had some ideas in mind for the evening and there was a place I remembered in the Murzuq that would suit better than the closer Ubari. This Twin Bonanza had a three-abreast bench seat at the front of the cabin and a couple of fully reclining executive seats in the back. I was sitting in the pilot's position at the left of the bench and Estelle was in the middle, right next to me. The control yoke on the Twin Bonanza is designed to be swung up, across and down in front of the middle section -- effectively a second pilot position - so I did just that, telling Estelle that it was time she learned to fly.

At first, like most people, she didn't dare touch the yoke in case she immediately put the plane into a terminal dive, and when I talked her into trying it she gripped it tightly, expecting to have to use strength to overpower the aircraft and keep it under control. I reached across, prised her hands away and showed her how to fly the plane with just her finger tips, and after a while she relaxed and started to enjoy it.

She had been concentrating so much on the flying that when I swung the yoke back over to my side and told her to look out in front of us, all she could say was 'oh my gaaaahd.' The massive sand dunes of the Murzuq were opening up ahead, not just scattered around anyhow but formed up in lines with the underlying desert floor visible between each row. I eased the plane into a long descent and by the time we crossed the near edge of the sand we were down to 300 feet. Skimming the first crest we dropped into the long valley between successive lines of dunes, and then up and over the next crest and down again, and Estelle grabbed hold of my bare thigh and squealed with excitement.

A couple more ridges and then I saw what I was looking for. I pulled the Twin Bonanza up into a climbing turn and put the wheels down. Estelle looked around for an airstrip and I pointed to a large white patch in one of the valleys, a long, wide dry lake bed laid down by water many millennia ago that I knew from a previous trip with some of my geologist passengers was both flat and firm. After touchdown I taxied up to the nearest dune, turned the plane to face down the length of what would later in the evening be the take-off run, and then shut down the engines and flight systems.

I leaned across Estelle, opened the cabin door and let her out, putting my finger to my lips to motion her to silence. The crackle of the cooling engine exhausts and the hum of the slowing instrument gyros gradually died away, and as she looked at me with a question in her eyes I told her to listen. And what she heard, for the first time in her life, was the utter, deadening, total lack of sound of the deep desert.

We stood still for a moment, drinking in the silence, and then I suggested that we watch the sunset from the top of the dune. Scrabbling up the slope, we took two steps forward and one back in the loose, dry sand, and when we reached the crest I flattened out a small area for us to sit down on. As I casually put my arm round her shoulders she moved in to sit close up to me and hooked her own arm over my thigh, both of us pretending we weren't fully aware of her elbow, pressing right up between my legs.

The sun gradually dropped to the horizon and as its edge touched the crest of a distant dune I told her to look for the green flash, and then had to explain just what the green flash was all about. So OK, as usual we couldn't claim that we had seen it, and then the light faded rapidly from the sky, as it does in these latitudes, and within half an hour all the stars had come out, great sweeps of brilliant light scattered across the velvet blackness above us, many more than we can ever see under the bright illuminations of civilization. After a while Estelle stirred under my arm and looked up at me.

'Thank you, thank you Jim, I'll remember this for the rest of my life.'

In the starlight I thought I could see tears of pleasure glinting in her eyes, and then I thought oh what the hell. I reached out my other hand to cup her face and leaned in towards her, slowly so as to give her plenty of opportunity to back off if she wanted. Her hand went to the back of my neck, the slight but very obvious pressure giving me all the permission I needed to move right in, and then we were kissing. Exploratory kisses, soft, experimental, each of us wondering how far to take it but not wanting to push things, lips gently moving against lips and the occasional tip of one tongue or the other flicking out and back. Then I pulled away from her.

'I've been wanting to do that ever since I first saw you.'

'I know.'

We went back to kissing again for a while, and then it was her turn to pull away. She asked me to go back down to the plane by myself and leave her up there on her own, and I half wondered if I had done the wrong thing. All I could say was OK, though I purposely made it sound like "OK but why?" and she caught the intonation in my voice.

'Ever since I was little I've tried to imagine what it must feel like, being all alone in the desert at night, naked under the stars, and imagining that I was the last human alive in all the world, and this is the first opportunity I've had to live it.'

Well, she could have been making me an offer but I didn't think she was, so I gave her a quick kiss, slipped and slid back down the side of the dune and went and leaned up against the wing of the plane, my mind running wild with thoughts of what she might be doing, all alone up there in the starlight.

Fifteen minutes later she came back down the dune. As she walked out on to the flat I could just make out that she was carrying something in her hands. She put it on the wing and as she did so I realised that it was a bundle of her clothes and all she was wearing were her briefs, the dark band across her hips contrasting with the lighter gleam of her body. Then she turned and walked the few feet up to me and I remember even now the way her full, free breasts swung gently from side to side in time with her steps. She put her hands on my arms, and I automatically reached out with mine to the bare flesh of that gorgeous trim waist, just above her briefs.

'Jim,' she said 'Right now I just feel like having a one night stand. I want a long slow fuck, with no questions and no commitments.'

I knew right away that this would be one of those occasions when I would be unable to think of an appropriate answer till tomorrow, so I didn't even try. I ran my hands down over her hips and then round to cup her bum and pulled her into me, and she wrapped both arms right round my neck and now there was a lot more passion in our kisses. By this time my dick was standing firmly to attention in my shorts and I pushed her belly from side to side against it so that she could feel the effect she was having on me. She responded beautifully, moving her feet apart and pulling up on tiptoe so that she could press in even closer and rub herself hard against me.

A couple of minutes of this was working us both up, and then she whispered that I had too many clothes on. I backed off a little, drew my hands round and up underneath those full breasts and said that she had better deal with things herself as my hands were busy elsewhere. So she giggled and did just that and when I was down to just my briefs she came back in again, plastering her warm curvy body right up to me.

With her mouth still hard up against mine I turned her sideways and ran my free hand over her waist and then down to slide into her panties, rubbing a finger slowly up and down her clit and feeling her jerk and gasp as I did so. Then I began moving my fingers in and out of her wet warm pussy and she pushed herself hard against my hand, reaching with her own hand into my briefs to grip my erection and start to wank me.

We enjoyed finger-fucking each other for a while, and then I couldn't wait any longer. I eased her briefs right down over her hips and they dropped to the ground, and when she stepped out of them I pulled her arms back up round my neck and wouldn't let her bring them down. Holding a completely naked woman in my arms while remaining partly clothed myself has always been a particular fantasy of mine.

Eventually I allowed her to strip off my briefs and then she used both hands to try and guide my rampant dick in between her legs, but the difference in our heights made it awkward to progress matters the way we both wanted. We really needed to be lying down together but the ground, while flat and smooth enough for a plane, was a lot rougher and sharper for bare bodies. Taking her hand I led her round the end of the wing and up into the cabin of the plane. Tilting one of the executive seats right back till it was flat, I retracted the armrests, lay down full length on it and pulled her over on top of me, capturing her mouth and then running my hands up and down over her warm curvy back and bum and hips, and enjoying the way her soft rounded body was wriggling down on my own.

She spread her legs and slid one hand down between us to grasp my dick and hold it in position with the tip just touching her wet lips, and then we both pulled together and I slid slowly and easily right up inside her gorgeous lubricated passage. And then it turned out to be neither a long fuck nor a slow one. After such an erotic build-up, we weren't about to take things gently and as I moved faster and faster in and out of her soft warm vagina she started grunting . . . unh . . . unh . . . unh . . . deep in her throat in time with my thrusts. Her sounds gradually moved up the scale and by the time I realised that I couldn't hold back any longer and came she was just about there herself, gritting oh fuck . . . oh fuck . . . through clenched teeth, moving one hand down to massage her clit at the same time as finishing herself off against my cock while it still had sufficient firmness in it.

Then we lay in each others' arms, getting our breath back and letting our heart rates return to normal. After a while I said that I was sorry to be a party-pooper, but the airfield would be shutting down as soon as the evening schedule arrived from Tripoli, and we had to be getting back. She whispered into my shoulder that she would rather stay out here all night, and I said that I would too, but if we didn't turn up there would be a missing aircraft alert and a search would start in the morning, and Dave would have to be told. So we dressed each other - that was a pleasure in itself - and got back into the plane and I started it up and warmed up the engines. I had a perfectly flat area two or three miles long and a mile wide in front of me, the white surface of the lake bed standing out so well in the bright starlight that I didn't even need to make use of the aircraft's powerful landing light for the take-off.

As we taxied in at Sebha we heard the Tripoli schedule make contact with the tower and then I shut everything down and we walked hand in hand back to the hotel in the warm starry night. I got a couple of drinks from the bar and we sat talking about the flying and the desert, and then a group of passengers from the schedule came in and the place got noisy. Estelle went for some more drinks and when she got back I thanked her for them. She said that it was she who had to thank me for everything, and when she emphasized the 'everything' with a sideways glance and a little grin I thought it worth pushing my luck again.

'Look, Estelle,' I said, 'when you said a one night stand, did you mean the whole night or did you just mean up to now?'

She laughed out loud, tossed back her drink, stood up abruptly and then leaned across the table close up to me.

'Your room, in fifteen minutes!'

*

NB: I have changed the names of the participants in this account for obvious reasons. Tripoli and Sebha are real locations and anyone with Google Earth on their computer can fly southwest out of Sebha for 75 miles to the small desert village of Murzuq (Google calls it Marzuq, but then they've never been there) and just beyond it are the long lines of dunes of the sand sea, exactly as I have described and just as I remember them. And the Twin Bonanza was a real plane too -- radio call-sign November 565 Mike Romeo. I wonder if after all these years it is still listed on the American register.